by Brynn Kelly
“You will regret this,” Hyland said to Laura, holding his ground. “If I go down, you’re coming, too. I’ll wring your pampered neck.”
“No, that’s not your style. You’d rather pay someone else to.” Laura looked at the ceiling, her eyes glossing over. “He wasn’t always like this,” she said to no one in particular. “They say he was damaged by his time in the marines, the CIA, by Mom’s death. He lost his empathy. His black and white was upended.”
“You know nothing.”
“I know a lot more than you’ve ever given me credit for, Pops.” Laura returned her gaze to Samira. “I was devastated when Latif was killed. I’m so sorry.”
Samira’s eyes pricked.
“But I’m thankful we got to Charlotte in time.”
“Charlotte?” Samira gasped. “Charlotte’s dead.”
“No.” Laura’s eyes brightened. “She’s fine.”
“But the photo... I saw her...”
“A trick. I saw your note in the game, with her location. We already had a team combing the area.” Laura exchanged another glance with her bodyguard. The other half of the we? “When you gave us the coordinates, we pulled her out quick. One of her guards’ phones pinged with a message from Fitz ordering her death, so we faked the photo, to buy us time. Oh, and our team came across a friend of yours trying to extract her single-handedly and unarmed—”
“Texas,” Jamie explained.
“Apparently, he’d almost succeeded,” Laura’s bodyguard added. “He was a little pissed that our guys were crashing his party.”
Rafe’s lip slightly curved upward.
Footsteps thundered down the hallway. Laura leaned forward to look through the open door, unfolding her arms. “The police commander, at last. I’ll go talk to her.” She turned. “Pops, I’m still your daughter. Nothing changes that. When the dust clears, when you’ve let all this go, I’ll be the only one standing by you. But I can’t be your enabler any longer. It’s over. There’s no coming back this time.” She sniffed.
Hyland sank into a chair, his head in his hands. Suddenly, he looked his age, like the spell of youth had been broken.
“The paramedics are here, too,” Laura said, still looking down the hallway. “Shall I send them in, Jamie?”
“I’ll take her out,” Jamie said, scooping Samira up. “There’s enough going on in here.”
Laura touched Samira’s shoulder as Jamie swept her past. Her cornflower eyes glimmered. “It’s an honor to finally meet you.” To Jamie she added, “Take care of her—and get her to unlock my social media. I have a few updates of my own to post.”
“Will do.” The beginnings of a grin played on Jamie’s face. “And don’t worry. She can take care of herself—not that I’m going anywhere.” The grin faded. “Not for a while.”
Samira’s heart clunked as Jamie carried her out, his body warm and solid and lithe. She might not have lost him to death but she would lose him. When? Tomorrow, next week, next month?
She’d had enough of waking up alone. She wanted to wake up to him.
* * *
BEFORE SAMIRA EVEN properly woke, the chemical smell clued her in. A hospital. She cracked her eyes open. A small dimmed room, blades of daylight sneaking in either side of a window blind. Distant voices murmured. A pair of sneakers squeaked, approaching and then receding.
She tried to pull herself up but her body wouldn’t respond. She patted her hip through a cotton blanket. It was like touching someone else’s body. Numbed. Beneath the blanket, beneath a hospital gown, a dressing crackled. An IV line was taped to the back of her hand but it wasn’t plugged into anything. She remembered the ambulance ride, lying on a gurney, Jamie holding her hand, breathing through the pain and nausea, waking briefly in a large, busy room—Recovery?
It was over. They’d done it. She exhaled, peace flushing through her veins like a cool anesthetic. They’d won.
And she’d woken alone. The first day of her new life and she’d woken alone. Had Jamie already returned to the Legion? Was this how it would be? Today a hospital, tomorrow maybe a hotel. Beyond that—what? Some apartment she couldn’t picture in a city she couldn’t picture. She couldn’t even picture a country. The world was hers again but she didn’t belong anywhere in it.
The door swished open. Jamie stepped in, still wearing his suit—and a smile that turned her insides to syrup. Turned out there was one thing sexier than a well-cut man in a well-cut suit—the same man in the same suit the morning after. Was it even morning?
“You’re kidding me,” he said. “I spend all night and all day sitting beside your bed and you wake up in the ten minutes it takes me to pop out and say goodbye to Rafe and Holly.”
“Wha—?” She coughed. Her throat felt like it had been blasted with a hairdryer.
He crossed to a cabinet beside the bed, poured water into a cup, popped a lid with a straw on it and passed it to her. She drank. Sometimes water tasted so good...
She cleared her throat. “Where are they going?”
“Rafe has a sister he was separated from as a child. He just got word that she’s been located, so he and Holly are flying out to meet her. Apparently she has a family of her own. He’s pretty stoked—and dare I say, emotional. I swear his eyes glazed for a second.”
“Wow.”
“They were sorry they couldn’t stick around. Holly’s looking forward to thanking you personally for saving her life.”
“I saved her li—? Oh that...” She touched her hip again.
“‘Oh that,’ she says, like it’s an everyday kind of a something to do.”
“I can’t believe I did that.”
“I can. Though, fuck, hearing that gunshot, seeing the blood on you...” He shuddered. “I think it’s going to be one of those recurring nightmares, where I’m looking for you, in room after room, with guns going off.”
Her cheek throbbed. She touched it, lightly. It was puffy, tender. Fitz had hit her. And Hyland. “How long have I been asleep?”
“A while. The anesthetic wore off overnight but you were exhausted.”
“Awo. I remember waking in the night.” She’d been disorientated, tipped out of a shadowy dream. But then Jamie’s voice—soothing and deep... She’d drifted off again, with the comforting feeling of being spooned, though he wasn’t touching her.
She tried to sit again, and winced, remembering.
“Hey,” he said, leaping to the bedside. How did he have so much energy? “Don’t lift yourself up. I’ll adjust the bed.” He fiddled with a control, and the back slowly rose. “You were very lucky that the bullet shied away from your intestine but you have an impressive flesh wound.”
“Did you sleep here?”
“Sleep’s an exaggeration, but...” He nodded at an armchair. “There was a lot of explaining to do—not nearly as much for me as for Hyland, though. He’s on a plane back to the States. Laura talked him into coming clean about everything—seeing as there was no longer any point in denial. It was all in the files you released, clear as day. His links to terrorism, his long history of blackmail and corruption... Tess reckons it could take months before they even figure out how many crimes he’s committed—but conspiracy to mass murder is a good start. Honestly, I don’t understand half of it, but fortunately, the president does. Apparently he was most especially interested in the photo Hyland had used to blackmail the special counsel into burying evidence in the investigation into him. And Tess is in journalist nirvana, as you can imagine. Flynn reckons she hasn’t blinked since the files started uploading.”
“She’s been released?”
“Aye, and exonerated, along with you and me and your parents. And Charlotte’s on her way up to Edinburgh to see you. By outing Hyland you’ve saved everybody’s skins, so the journey’s all but over for us.” He smoothed her hair back from her forehead. Her scalp tingled. “We just n
eed to get you well.”
We. We as in the world, the health system, their little group of rebels—or we as in Jamie and Samira?
“When can I go...?” She squeezed her eyes shut.
“Samira?” he said, taking her hand. “You need painkillers?”
She opened her eyes. He leaned over her, his eyes crinkling. She remembered touching his wrinkles at the hotel, saying something stupid about them. “No. It’s just... I was going to say ‘When can I go home?’ But...”
“You don’t have a home.”
“Awo.”
“You can have one, now. You can start rebuilding your life.” He hooked his foot around a plastic chair, pulled it up beside her and sat, holding her hand in both of his. “And anyway, you’ll not be going anywhere for a few weeks, not while you’re recuperating—and there are some immigration matters to be sorted.”
“Oh God.”
He chuckled. “Nothing to worry about. You’ve gone from wanted woman to folk hero overnight. The UK authorities have just kindly asked if you can fill out the proper paperwork and present your genuine passport.”
She relaxed onto the bed. As she inhaled, her side pinched. “What about you?” she said. “Will you go back to Corsica?”
“I have some recuperating of my own to do. In more ways than one.” He tightened his grip on her fingers, shifting his chair closer. “I was thinking, Samira. It’s Christmas soon. I know Scotland’s not the most pleasant of places in winter but it can also be quite...” A grin pulled at his mouth but once again didn’t quite erupt. “Romantic.”
Her stomach clenched, shooting a bolt of pain deep into her side.
“I’d like to spend some time with Nicole and the kids and see my mother,” he continued, dropping focus to their hands. “And I’d love to spend some more time with you.”
“Me, too,” she squeaked.
“So I’m thinking maybe we could find a wee cottage by a loch—one that hasn’t been bombed recently—and hide away for a bit, while we recover, get our heads around everything that’s happened. I’m theoretically injured, so getting the leave shouldn’t be a problem.”
A cottage. With an open fire. And Jamie. And no one shooting or bombing them. Could anything be more appealing? Did it snow in Scotland in December?
“I’d like that,” she said.
She wanted to say so much more but the words wouldn’t come. Somehow she’d found the courage to confront the man who’d killed her fiancé, and to dive in front of a bullet, but she couldn’t find the courage to tell Jamie that there was this big bubble sitting in her chest and it was filled with the magic that was him and she didn’t want it to burst.
Or could she?
He rubbed his thumb over the back of her hand. “Before we, you know...return to our lives.”
Our lives. Separate lives. Spoken so deliberately, like he’d sensed what she was about to ask—not that even she knew what that was.
“Samira?”
This was exactly what he’d warned her of. We could never work, you and I. I can’t have a relationship. I can’t live in the real world. At the time the real world had seemed so distant. And now here it was, with all its mundane everyday self-doubt. She’d leveled up, all right. Leveled up and bombed out.
“I think... I need to sleep,” she said, retrieving her hand. Unable to flip to her side, she turned her head to a beige wall. God, hadn’t she told him she wasn’t ready for a relationship either? And she’d meant it. But now that her life was no longer in danger, now the people she cared for were safe, she was struggling to remember why.
Regret, like a tail, comes at the end.
He was silent awhile. “Sure,” he said. She sensed him leaning in. He pressed a kiss to her temple. “I’ll leave you alone.” His footsteps padded to the door, then stopped. “I found this for you,” he said, quietly, as if not wanting to disturb her from sleep. “Thought you might want it back.”
After a few seconds, he padded back over to the bed. She resisted looking. Her eyes would give away too much. A few seconds later, the door whispered open, and hissed closed, leaving the room in thick silence.
She turned. Her scarf was draped over the foot of the bed. La couleur de minuit.
She didn’t want to be alone anymore.
And it turned out she was the kind of woman who fought for what she wanted.
* * *
JAMIE’S BREATH PUFFED out as moonlit fog as he watched Samira unlock their legally rented holiday cottage, after parking their legally hired car. From the loch, a bird cawed. Samira’s hair fell softly over her minuit scarf as she stepped back and held the door open.
“Next time we’re renting a fully insulated twenty-first-century apartment,” he said, sweeping past with an armful of firewood and switching on the lights with an elbow. “It’s colder inside than out.”
“I quite like the eighteenth century now that I’m no longer living in it,” she said, hauling in their stash of Christmas presents. “But we’ll need to get you a kilt.”
“You have a thing for guys in kilts.”
“I have a thing for a particular guy in a kilt. At least, I would, if he wore one.”
“Nasty, draughty, scratchy things.”
“Not very patriotic, Jamie.”
As he got started on the fire, she leaned over him to turn on the Christmas tree lights. As she withdrew, she dropped a kiss on his crown. He caught a waft of the perfume he’d given her that morning, which Max and Tyler had helped him choose in a Christmas Eve assault on a mega mall that hadn’t existed last time he’d been in Scotland. At first the kids had dragged their clompy feet as if perfume shopping were equivalent to mucking out latrines—but after a few minutes they’d launched into the task with endearing seriousness, wrinkling their noses at anything too floral, or too strong, or too “old lady.” In the end the three of them agreed on a perfume that reminded Jamie of running water and jasmine and sunshine. Which would have been far cheaper.
He’d felt a tweak of jealousy that the kids had bonded with Samira so effortlessly when they were still a little standoffish with him, but then, he had a lot of uncle neglect to make up for—and he didn’t know where to find the Orb of Glowing or whatever the fuck they were hunting in their latest game. He’d at least figured out which kid was which. He was working on the rest. From now on, he was spending his leave with them, not with medical journals.
As the fire began to take, Samira switched off the overhead light. The pulsing tree lights explored new depths in her softly curling hair—red, green, blue, orange—each color also bringing out a different warmth or coolness in her skin. Her face had lost its strained look in the last month, the sooty circles disappearing from under her eyes.
“Perfect,” he said.
“Not quite.” She strolled to the butcher’s block in the middle of the kitchen, swiping her mobile phone. A familiar intro of piano and strings circled the room. He smiled as a laconic, indecipherable male voice growled the opening to the Pogues’ Christmas song. What was it called? “Fairytale of New York”?
Now, that was his idea of a Christmas carol, after a day of Nicole’s Frank Sinatra on repeat. He’d been content to put up with it during his mother’s visit, savoring the look of peace on her face as she swayed in her chair to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” But by the end of the night even Samira’s parents were tactfully dropping hints about changing the music. Their diplomatic skills had been no match for Nicole’s determination to create the busy, noisy family Christmas she’d missed out on for so many years—and not even the kids really minded.
“You can bring the music next Christmas,” she’d told Samira’s parents, with excruciating emphasis. Jamie had looked sideways at Samira, whose gaze had dropped to her lap. They’d hardly talked about the fact that Jamie was due to report to Calvi immediately after the New Year. Only one more we
ek of this borrowed and rented and hired bliss.
Jamie sat back on his haunches. “What, you mean you’ll allow a man to sing to you?”
“It’s a duet. And at least it’s not Sinatra dreaming of a white Christmas for the twentieth time.”
“Thank sweet baby Jesus himself for that.” Jamie rubbed his hands together as he pushed to his feet. “We’d better do something to warm up while that catches—and by that I mean dance because I know where your dirty mind is going.”
She laughed as he swept her into his arms, careful to avoid her injured side. It was healing well but it would trouble her awhile longer. His shoulder was coming right, too. A lot of things had come right in the last month. They swayed together, her new scent wafting in with the wood smoke and wrapping around him. He leaned in for a warm, sweet kiss.
As the drumbeat turned the song from ballad to jig, and the woman singer launched in, Jamie upped the pace, spinning and dipping Samira until she laughed breathlessly, their boots scraping and squeaking across the wooden floor. God, she was beautiful. This was beautiful. The cottage had more comforts than the previous one but it was simple enough that life was dialed back to the small pleasures—not that being with Samira was any small pleasure.
They’d wasted quite enough time giving lengthy witness statements to investigators representing more government agencies and crime-fighting forces than he knew existed, juggling medical appointments, and dissecting developments over video calls with Tess and Flynn, Rafe and Holly, Charlotte, and even Laura, whom Hyland had given the credit for forcing him to come clean.
As the song ended, Jamie dipped Samira and kissed her giggling mouth.
“Thank you, mo ghràidh.” He pulled her up, keeping one arm around her back. She rested her free hand on his chest as the music switched to Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly.”
“You called me that once. My friend, right?”
“No, actually. It means my love, my darling. I’d kind of said it then without thinking of the implications, so...”
“You lied. Huh.” She pulled back and the skin around her eyes tightened momentarily. “Did you think about the implications just now?”
